Explanation:
The hot surface of
Venus shows clear signs of ancient
lava flows.
Evidence of this was bolstered by the
robot spacecraft Magellan, which orbited
Venus in the early 1990s.
Using imaging radar,
Magellan
was able to peer beneath the thick perpetual
clouds
that cover Earth's closest planetary neighbor.
Picture above, lava apparently flowed down from
the top of the image and pooled in the light colored
areas visible across the image middle and bottom.
The lava cut a channel across the darker ridge that
runs horizontally across the image center.
The picture covers about 500 kilometers across.
The lava originates from a caldera named Ammavaru that lies about 300 kilometers off the
image top.
The hot dense climate makes Venus a more difficult planet on which to
land spacecraft and
rovers.
Venus currently
sparkles as the brightest object in the western sky after sunset.